Author: c_good

TAS: Tool Acquisition Syndrome. The Struggle Is Real.

I heard the term Tool Acquisition Syndrome on some welding or woodworking podcast. It’s witty and descriptive. “Shiny Object Syndrome” is a similar term I’ve heard in entrepreneur and small business podcasts.

Both terms describe the tendency to buy more tools. Usually this ends up delaying a project: the tool must be bought, arrive, be unpacked, the manual read, and so on.

I’ve found one of the counters to TAS is to look through all the things which can be done by the tools I already own. Many electronic devices can do a surprising number of things.

Once in a great while there will be a great sale on a tool I don’t actually need. I’ve purchased some really interesting tools that way. But generally, I don’t need to buy new tools, I already have what I need.

Warning: Zipped Files in Windows Are Not Locked

I’ve recently been helping a friend organize some files from a series of backup drives and thumb drives.

I’m finding several zipped file folders. I’m often looking into the contents of those zipped file folders.

I’ve found that while I can’t paste anything into the zipped file folder while it’s still zipped and compressed, I can delete files and folders out of those zipped file folders. I can do that while the folder is still zipped.

My friend thinks the “zip files” are a sacrosanct golden standard. I’ll explain to them that they’re not.

The Easy Way Is Usually Mined

Last week I wrote about human-machine interfaces and how difficult it is to make an interface which is intuitive to use.

One of the promises of modern software, smart devices, and development, and software frameworks is how much easier it will make things.

But does it really?

One examples I run into a few times a year is a scoring program for a kids’ competition. The competition is archery, there are multiple age brackets, types of bow, and clubs. Each round generates anywhere from 20 to 40 scores per competitor who competed that round. There are two software programs I’ve heard of which are written to keep track of all this for competitors (and more importantly, competitors’ parents and coaches).

One program is an Excel spreadsheet with a bit of macros and VBA programming. The other is a tablet-based app.

Hot and New

The tablet-based program is “simpler” and “easier” and its fans describe it as simpler and easier. I have not looked at it closely, but questioning people who have used it or been present at matches where it has been used, I’ve found out a bit about how it works. The tablet-based app won’t work without an internet connection. So some major part of it’s functioning does not take place on the tablets.

An internet connection with multiple devices requires a router. All routers have a finite amount of connections they can handle at one time. How the router handles more devices talking to it than it has channels to talk depends on the router and the devices.

In addition, because the tablet-based app is “simpler” and “easier,” and unspoken is the always present belief that technology is magic and always makes things better, paper scorecards are not used. Score are entered on the tablets. I don’t know the exact interface for the competitor to confirm yes, that is their score. But I have heard from multiple parents and coaches that scores can be lost if a judge or competitor presses the wrong button on the screen. I’ve even heard that multiple competitors’ scores can be lost if a wrong button is pressed on the screen.

Assuming all goes well, the score will be sent to wherever it is processed. Entered scores can be accessed via the internet with anyone with an internet connection. So people present at the match can look up scores on their smart phone.

Old and Busted

Now I will discuss the old, difficult, outdated Excel spreadsheet method. Scores are written down by judges on paper scoresheets. The competitors get to see their scores and agree to them before the scores are sent to the scorekeeper.

The scorekeeper must have a Windows PC with Microsoft Excel running on it. The scores are entered by hand. The Excel spreadsheet does have an option to compute what has been entered. When it does so, it creates a page in the spreadsheet which is formatted to be printed on 8-1/2″ x 11″ inch paper. The paper gets posted when a new copy with new scores is printed.

If Microsoft Excel is running locally on the Windows PC, then no internet connection is required. It is not possible to lose all scores for a competitors’ round by hitting the wrong button on a screen; the paper scorecard still exists, regardless of how many buttons are pressed on which screens.

“We started telling our kids to keep track of their own scores”

A parent in this sport told me their club started telling competitors to keep their own copies of their scores. They said this at matches where the newer, simpler tablet-based app was being used. They said this because there were so many problems with the tablet-based app losing scores. And once a score was lost, it was unrecoverable because there was no paper copy.

Technology is not magic. “There’s an app for that” is not the answer to everything. The easy way is usually mined.

Strange Comments

I get hardly any comments on this blog. There was one when I first started about seven months ago offering to help me set up WordPress sites.

But occasionally I get comments which appear to be gibberish, or encrypted text. I’m not sure which. The email addresses are always in Outlook. The user name is gibberish. The other user information (besides the email address) is gibberish. The comment itself is gibberish.

It’s very odd.

The Simpler It Is, The Closer You Look, Part 2

Humans do not think like machines. Machines do not process information like humans.

Which is obvious, yet the results are often not considered.

Making a machine interface that is intuitive to humans is really difficult. Presenting complex information in way that is easy for humans to read is really difficult. Here are some of the things which have to be considered:

  • How is the information organized?
  • What information are we talking about? Are we presenting flight schedules or grocery shopping lists?
  • Do regular users and new users have different concerns?
  • Do we need to emphasize if anything has changed from last time?
  • How can the information be presented so the expected reader can easily find what they think is most important to find, while also letting the publisher or organizer highlight what they think is most important to present?

Those issues are things I came up with just thinking about it as I’m writing this. There were and still are whole entire disciplines and professions devoted to this.

When I find something which is intuitive to use, whether it’s gas pump prices, a website, or the dashboard of a car, I try to stop and admire what was achieved. I also try to see what I might learn. If there’s a lot of information shown in an intuitive and easy-to-understand manner, someone put a lot of work into that.

Useful Link: Humble Bundle For Good (And Sometimes Unexpected) Deals

I can’t remember how I found Humble Bundle. It’s a really great and thoroughly addictive site. They have bundles of various things such as software, games, and digital books. The prices are usually unbeatable. Part of the price will go to a charity.

There are usually online class bundles for something software related at any given time. They also have many book bundles. I’ve seen book bundles on software, but also on hardware, sewing, outdoors skills, and many other things.

The bundles are limited in time and it’s unpredictable (at least to me) what will show up at any given time.

It’s definitely a good site. No, I’m not compensated by them in any way. I think it’s a good site.

The Simpler It Is, The Closer You Look, Part 1

The simpler a physical operation or technology seems to be, the closer I’ll be to worrying about material properties.

Every physical thing eventually goes back to a natural material. Even “synthetic” materials such as plastics, nylon, or viscose, eventually come from a natural material. And natural materials vary.

Whether a natural variance will affect the end use is often hard to predict. A few years ago Consumer Reports took a close look at gluten-free foods and found that one of the hidden dangers was arsenic poisoning. Many gluten-free foods contain rice flour. Rice is grown in different areas with different soils; and rice has a tendency to absorb arsenic from the soil (if the soil has arsenic; some soils don’t).

I used rice as an example, but every other natural material has equally unexpected variances somewhere. When I buy a good such as quilting cotton, there’s an unseen army of people I’m depending on. Someone grew the cotton, harvested it, processed it, and spun it into thread. Someone else took that thread and wove cloth out of it at a set width and tightness of fabric. And then someone after that dyed or printed the cloth.

The further I go back in any chain of assembly or manufacture or processing, the closer I’ll be to taking a very close look at physical properties in the material itself. If I have to do that, then I’ll probably start learning about how to specify those properties when buying, and how to test for those properties, and how often I’ll need to test.

The simpler it is, the closer I need to look at everything.

Useful Finds: Taking the time for a class rather than re-inventing the wheel, MS Excel

I generally avoid Microsoft Office if I can. It tries to do too much. And no matter how much I log in and confirm on whichever websites, if I am using Microsoft Office while I’m logged in to Windows on a different email than I bought the Microsoft Office license under, Windows and Microsoft Office throw fits.

Currently, I’m working on a project which needs Excel. I signed up for a couple of Udemy courses. I’m currently working my way through the first one, Unlock Excel VBA and Excel Macros by Lella Gharani. I’m only partway through and I’ve already learned a lot.

Thoughts About Technology: Our Brains Are Not Hard Drives. Write It Down.

I don’t like to admit mistakes. I think most people are the same way.

So none of us like to admit what we’ve forgotten. If we forget enough things, we start to forget what we’ve forgotten.

If it’s something I want to remember, I need to write it down. And if it’s worth keeping, I’ll eventually come back to it. Which means I’ll probably have to do some occasional reorganization of what I’ve written. Again, if the information is worth keeping, I’ll come back to it and it will be worth the time to reorganize.

It took me a long time to realize this. I thought it was just me, until I started to notice how few people keep notes on anything. And how much people struggle to recreate or rediscover information which I know they already had.

Write it down.

Useful Finds: A Bunch of Links About AI and ChatGPT.

Last week I wrote about my skepticism about ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence. I read and heard multiple further criticisms and critiques of the use of artificial intelligence since then. When I started looking for those links for this post, I found several more.

The Difference Between a Content Creator and Content Editor

In a discussion on the Software Defined Talk podcast episode 400, Matt Ray (one of the hosts) described using ChatGPT to create content. ChatGPT can quickly create a lot of text very quickly, but not all of it is good. It’s not even always factually accurate. Ray pointed out there is a large difference between creating content and editing content created by someone else.

I’d Have Expected the Companies Showcasing These to Understand This and to Have Some Content Editors.

And I would have been wrong to expect that.

As a short recounting of some current events: ChatGPT is launched, gets lots of attention. Microsoft announces it will buy ChatGPT, or its parent company, and ChatGPT will become part of Microsoft’s search engine Bing. Bing gets a tiny fraction of search engine traffic, and search engine advertising dollars, that the Google search engine gets. Cue breathless articles about this being the end of Google’s dominance in internet search. Google announces they have been researching AI themselves for quite a while. Google shows an ad where their own AI answers questions. It gets a question wrong and since this coincides with a massive drop in Google’s stock price, the former is assumed to have caused the latter.

But as The Register explains in “Microsoft’s AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo” by Katyanna Quach, dated February 14 2023 and last accessed February 14 2023, Microsoft’s search AI demonstration also had factual errors. In some cases, pretty severe errors that in theory would have been easy to spot. It wrongly stated easy-to-look-up facts about product features and bar and restaurant hours and options.

(I’m adding “last accessed” dates for the text articles in this post because some of the articles I’m referencing have revision dates in addition to post dates.)

From Quach’s article:

None of this is surprising. Language models powering the new Bing and Bard are prone to fabricating text that is often false. They learn to generate text by predicting what words should go next given the sentences in an input query with little understanding of the tons of data scraped from the internet ingested during their training. Experts even have a word for it: hallucination.

If Microsoft and Google can’t fix their models’ hallucinations, AI-powered search is not to be trusted no matter how alluring the technology appears to be. Chatbots may be easy and fun to use, but what’s the point if they can’t give users useful, factual information? Automation always promises to reduce human workloads, but current AI is just going to make us work harder to avoid making mistakes.

The Register, “Microsoft’s AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo” by Katyanna Quach, dated February 14 2023, last accessed February 14 2023,

Why didn’t either Google/Alphabet or Microsoft check the answers the AI gave before their demonstrations? Did they assume the answers would always be correct? Or that the probability of correct responses would be high enough it was worth the risk? Or that everyone would enthralled and not check at all? I have no idea.

Intellectual Property Rights? We Don’t Need No Stinking Intellectual Property Rights! Except For Our Own Intellectual Property. Then, Yes, Please!!

I might make that the subject of a whole other post another day. To put it briefly: Many of these models, language and image, are trained on large amounts of publicly available information. In the free, research, or crowd-sourcing stages, intellectual property rights to the information used for training are often not discussed. Then the model has some success, money gets involved, and those issues become very important.

“Move fast and break things” is similar to “Rules are meant to be broken.” Both statements sounds cool and daring until things of real value are involved, such as money and copyright infringement.

ChatGPT, the Latest Darling, Is Not as Neutral as It Says It Is

Here are a couple of posts from the Substack page Rozado’s Visual Analytics by David Rozado and a referencing post from Reclaim the Net:

To summarize the three posts, when asked if it has a political bias ChatGPT says it does not and claims that as an Ai, it cannot. When asked questions from numerous different tests of political ideology, ChatGPT tested moderate on one and some version of left, left-leaning, or liberal on all the others.

Is it the content ChatGPT is trained on? Was there an inadvertent bias in the people who chose the content? Is “The Political Bias of ChatGPT – Extended Analysis” Rozado explains he first documented a political bias in ChatGPT in early December 2022. ChatGPT went through an update in mid-December 2022, which Rozado said included a mitigation of the political bias in answers. Then after an update in January 2023, the political bias was back.

I’ve chosen not to go through all of Rozado’s posts, but there are quite a few. This is a topic which has a lot more than I’m writing here. I’m pointing out that there’s more to read than I’m referencing here because that’s part of my point: none of this is simple. None of it is the easy replacement of messy human interaction that technology in general and AI in particular is claimed to be.

That Political Bias? Quickly Defeated With the Right Questions.

Zerohedge’s post “Go Woke, Get Broken: ChatGPT Tricked Out Of Far-Left Bias By Alter Ego ‘DAN’ “ written by the eponymous Tyler Durden, dated February 13 2023 and last accessed February 14 2023, is about breaking ChatGPT’s clearly documented political bias.

How is this done? Tell it to pretend it is DAN, Do-Anything-Now, and provide answers to prompts both as itself and as DAN.

The results are surprising, and interesting, and humorous. The Zerohedge post links to entire Reddit discussions about how to break ChatGPT.

No, I haven’t read through all those Reddit discussions, although I probably will at some time in the future. I know I’m beating this drum a lot, but I’ll repeat it again: trying to replace humans with technology, AI or anything else, is not as easy as claimed.

ChatGPT Still Can’t Do Light Verse or Even Romantic Rhymes.

Those endless poems, some banal and some quite good, which start with “Roses Are Red and Violets Are Blue”? ChatGPT is awful at those and at light verse as well.

The Register‘s post “Roses are red, algorithms are blue, here’s a poem I made a machine write for you” by Simon Sharwood, dated February 13 2023, and Quillette‘s post “Whatever Happened to Light Verse?” by Kevin Mims, dated February 2 2023, both last accessed February 14 2023, are both very good